Omnia Exeunt In Mysterium: Musick, Images & Poetry

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Encomium To The Source (IV)

The faces of the clouds are grinning
In the space of a door which will not close, when day is done

With aching joints in the sunlight
Uncertain of this steel flue for the stove
I await bags of hydraulic lime

Are the swallows late here?

Last night I recalled snowfall along Dr. Mott’s Road
Without presentience, a border crossed
Too quiet for me to hear though I felt its frequencies –
A drone to my learning of a chant which opened Earth.

Today, another hill hundreds of miles and years from there
Graced this time by violets, but now I have no song
Which could ever interlock with the stream speaking with the Sun.

Leaving the party, I regarded the land beyond the sea:
The steel-blue orators were softened by dusk
So they folded upon the horizon like sleep
And yet in the centre, even further distant, a peak clothed in snow
And lit by the Sun.

Returning home, I felt the frequencies of the sky:
On whose brow do the celestial bodies gently fall and dissolve;
In whose garden, where darkness is the bark which brings forth the blossom?

In the forest, I would wonder on the patterns of the primroses;
How perhaps they might mirror the constellations, or are caused by them:
Who or what was I mirroring?

I take my place as a breath upon moss
For the chants now are the labours of the garden:
A broken septic tank, whilst sparrows leap within the beech hedge

My head crowned with branches, and choking on last year’s beech leaves
I swung the mattock to open Earth and my mask fell with the clear water
Down to the rocky chamber and taken away
Returned to darkness, the location of grace.

I took up the slate from the Earth and re-arranged it back into the soil;
Layered, to allow Space to flow between: the practical, the sacred, without division.

All that remained was the soakaway marked by a few stones
Enveloped by the whirling cosmos, with the hatchet of Ursa Major
Falling or flowing upwards: there is no geometry in the love I feel.

I hid my eyes and faced the soil, whilst a featureless green comet passed Jupiter.
My hair and lungs and dreams were filled with plaster and a century of dust.

Today, I paused work to lie upon the woodpile beneath the hazel;
Bees gathering at the berberis
And close by, cherry blossom emerging from the darkness of bark.

I will wait here for the rosy flower of the larch, my cosmic clock:
Two swallows now over the newly turned red soil.

A door which will not close

In the celestial hilasterion, I saw seven emanations of a figure
Each one fainter as they progressed to the doorway.
But it was the room itself which sung to me, and the figure was gone.

There, a wall upon which was painted a wheel of seven spheres;
A bird sat at the lowest left sphere, a dragon at the right sphere above.
The wall had to be brought down.

And so, an entrance revealed, with only the dragon partially surviving.
At first, a chamber of many closed doors.
A white, wild pony appeared at the centre, then receded.
A brief glimpse of a dead astronaut, suspended from the domed ceiling
Then a black polyhedron set upon the tiled floor.

Swaermian gave way to a colosseum, infinitely rising or collapsing
Hinting at labyrinths through its arches.
The middle archway, an entrance to an Eridiian void.

Mhuiral, distressing as the years fly forward;
And the anthromorph that is the pine marten
Watches for a moment the ocean enter
And engulf the world without end…

Tonight I will regard the Moon with Jupiter to its right,
Perhaps both anointing what Cuan Siar conceals.
All will be still, except for the tides within me:
The drone of personal transfiguration, or centuries-hence deluge?

For I am of the flood of Aeons which will bring forth a New Earth
Purified by the sea, and with no trace of us left
Save the fading symbols of our unknowing.

So what use all this planting?
To restore a balance – for whom or for what, it does not matter.

But for now, I will attempt to craft a door frame
So that this door may give respite from the elements:
Sun upon the hill, now reddening.
Rain from the petrified cloud, now blackening
Snow carried over the inky-dark years, dyssolving

The gathering Cirrus call absence:
I pick up the hand-axe, and work
Each blow, each exertion bringing emptiness.